Comment 26 for bug 1448092

It is a condition of distribution in partner that things are policy-compliant. This means packages, unless they have a very good reason to, should ship files in Debian-policy compliant directories (this means following the FHS precisely and shipping in /usr/lib/$package, or even better, shipping files in the typical locations: /usr/bin or /usr/sbin for binaries, /usr/share/man for manpages, /etc for configuration, /run or /var/lib or other locations for temporary or "permanent" runtime files, etc.). The /opt hierarchy is fine too, provided that *everything* the package ships is under /opt directories, or /etc/opt or /var/opt (as per FHS).

Would it be possible to recompile just to replace /var/perf/pm with /opt/ibm/pm? Or even better, update the program to be fully FHS-compliant and not expect any particular hard-coded path? This way we could have a PMLinux.cfg in a reasonable location and use it to guide binaries as to where to find what they need, or have the binaries "just work" without any config file present?

One further issue with relocation to /opt remains the manpages; they really should go to /opt too if the binaries are there, and this poses further problems. We don't have automated man path detection; from what I gather from /etc/manpath.config, files should be placed in /opt/man/... so as to match binaries from /opt/sbin or /opt/bin; and don't really go looking down into /opt/ hierarchies. This would need testing to make sure the manpages properly work where they'd be placed.